How We Work With Pakistan

Eli Lake reports on how the US manages to get intelligence cooperation despite the crazy internal politics of our "ally" – by creating alternate pro-American institutions:

Within the [Inter Services Intelligence], America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted [Younis al] Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.

Frum, who calls Lake's reporting "amazing," takes on myths that he believes are threatening Pakistani democracy.

(Photo: Pakistani Islamists burn an effigy of US President Barack Obama during a protest in Lahore on December 2, 2011, against the cross-border NATO air strike on Pakistani troops. By Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images.)